Arthur Schopenhauer indicates that satisfaction is happiness and in order to achieve that a person has to have a desire; a want and a need for something. However this is a negative feeling but it is because our " will-to-live" produces these thoughts we can not protest because we have a will-to-live. Never the less it is only negative in correlation of preventing suffering. Schopenhauer quotes Lucretius saying
" Suave, mari magno, turbantibus aequora ventis,
E terra magnum alterius spectare laborem:
Non, quia vexari quemquam est jucunda voluptas;
Sed, quibus ipse malis careas, quia cernere suave est." [320]
" It is a pleasure to stand on the seashore when the tempestuous winds whip up the sea, and behold the great toils another is enduring. Not that is pleases us that watch another be tormented, but that it is a joy to us to observe evils from with we ourselves are free" [320]
Schopenhauer uses this to intertwine art into this perspective because he believes that in art but especially in poetry a persons true mirror of the real nature of the world and of life comes forth. So happiness can only bring something negative because there is no lasting satisfaction. Desire delivers us from pain or want; however it is only followed by a different kind of pain or empty longing, and boredom.
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